Don't listen to those who despise us

Date: 26th June 2006

by Noel Pearson

Indigenous cultures can adapt, just like any
other.

TODAY'S ministerial summit about violence and child abuse is a
commendable initiative by Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough.
Many people have reservations about whether another summit will
lead to anything.

But that is not the only problem. The necessary focus on
humanitarian emergencies and educational failure makes us as a
nation less inclined to reflect on the relationship between the
peoples of Australia and Aboriginal Australians' ultimate place in
this country.

In Australia, we have had two great debates about national
issues: the debates about the rights of Aboriginal Australians, and
about Australian history.

Conservative Australians have lent considerable support to
contributors Keith Windschuttle and Gary Johns. Windschuttle has
been appointed to the board of the ABC, and Education Minister
Julie Bishop has endorsed the Johns' Menzies Research Centre paper
Aboriginal Education: Remote Schools and the Real
Economy.

I want to explain why Aboriginal Australians can have a dialogue
with the conservatives about policy and history.

First, we should be able to agree with conservative and liberal
people that Aboriginal Australians' need modernity, geographic
mobility, full command of English, education and economic
integration.

Second, cultural relativism should be rejected in favour of
embracing modernity when it comes to the fundamental economic and
social organisation of societies. It is natural for peoples to
advance from hunting and gathering to agriculture to industrialism.
What peoples retain is a matter of cultural and spiritual
choice.

Third, in the debate about Australian history, rigour and
revision of history is essential.

Fourth, much of the political rights criticism of the
progressive consensus about policies for Aboriginal Australians is
correct, particularly in relation to welfare and substance
abuse.

However, I am very concerned about the damage conservative
Australians are doing to the prospects of reconciliation through
their uncritical endorsement of people such as Windschuttle and
Johns. Their influence has decreased empathy with Aboriginal
Australians. Johns and Windschuttle would probably reply that it is
their critics who lack empathy because the left defends flawed
policies that ruin Aboriginal Australians' lives. The coldness that
characterises Johns and Windschuttle is an inexplicable antagonism
to Aboriginal Australians' wish to remain distinct.

Windschuttle's defence against the charge of lack of empathy is
that the responsibility of the historian is not to be
compassionate, it is to be dispassionate to try to get at the
truth. But Windschuttle's and Johns' antagonism to Aboriginal
Australians means that they are unable to remain dispassionately
objective.

For example, Windschuttle's generalisation that the early stages
of dispossession was not against the will of most Aborigines is not
a correction of leftist distortion of history, it is distortion in
the opposite direction. The influence of Johns' and Windschuttle's
irrational contempt is causing their powerful conservative audience
(and thereby Australia) to move further away from the modern,
enlightened view that minorities have the right to agreements with
the central power about securing the survival of their identity and
political rights.

In his recent government-endorsed paper, Johns argued that
Aboriginal Australians have no right to government-funded education
about their culture and languages.

His irrational argument was that a modern Western education
system cannot maintain a preliterate, nomadic culture. Of course it
cannot. But we have a right to government support for a modern,
literate, prosperous version of our culture. This right to cultural
continuity is exactly the same right the non-indigenous
conservatives demand when they fight to prevent postmodern
gobbledegook from pushing knowledge about old Western culture out
of the curriculum.

The difference between Australia and most other shared Western
states is that the Australian minority peoples until recently had a
pre-modern culture and no connection with the world economy. To
secure Aboriginal economic development, it might be necessary for
us to make far-reaching concessions to the dominant culture.

Aboriginal Australian culture and economy have changed and must
change. But it seems that conservatives increasingly believe that
the difficulties of this transformation justify a complete denial
of Aboriginal Australians rights as a minority.

There has been nothing more dispiriting for me than the
prominence of Windschuttle's and Johns' ideas in conservative
political and cultural circles. Windschuttle's thesis about the
absence of a notion of land ownership in Aboriginal Australia, and
Johns' notion that our culture is unable to change and must
therefore be left to die, are threatening the prospects of
successful co-operation between Aboriginal Australians and the
conservatives.

Today's ministerial summit illustrates the dilemma we are
facing: the extreme crises in Aboriginal Australia and the low
capabilities of Aboriginal Australians make non-indigenous
Australians and our political leaders lose sight of the natural
ultimate goal, which is that Aboriginal Australians become a
prosperous constitutionally recognised First-World national
minority.

Noel Pearson is the director of the Cape York Institute for
Policy and Leadership.